The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Many datacenters undergo two major types of transformations over time. First, a typical datacenter experiences significant growth with an ever increasing number of software deployments. Second, the software architecture within the datacenter is typically improved or updated with advancements in technology or changes to the underlying deployment models. These transformations frequently lead to software deployments that are siloed, dispersed, varied and complex. Some enterprise deployments have hundreds and thousands of software deployments across multiple versions and various software patch levels.
The ever-increasing and divergent nature of software deployments within a datacenter leads to significant challenges for system administrators. A large, varied, distributed environment may demand quite a number of out of band emergency and ad-hoc changes to keep the systems performing properly. As the differences continue to exist and grow with additional deployments and updates, the risk of unpredictable failures and unplanned downtimes may increase. In addition, the varied and complex nature of the software deployments may result in poor resource utilization and cause issues with planned maintenance windows.